We’ve all been on the receiving end of bad. AI and selling.
Let’s talk about the right and wrong way to use AI in sales.
In this episode of Closing Time.
Thanks for tuning in to Closing Time, the show for go to Market Leaders.
I’m Val Riley, head of marketing for Insightly and Unbounce.
Today I am joined by Nick Caruso.
He is the CRO of knowledgeNet.ai.
Nick, thanks for joining us today. Well, thanks for having me, Val.
It’s a pleasure to be here.
Awesome.
It’s tempting to look at all that AI offers
in terms of efficiency and try to apply that to sales, right?
But we’ve talked a little bit about activities versus outcomes,
and that’s really where we need to put up a caution sign, I think. It is.
I mean, AI is completely transforming this entire space.
the biggest use of AI right now is in software development.
A lot of people,
I think, that are in college right now that are in software development roles.
I’m saying, well,
maybe you may want to rethink that because it’s truly transformative.
And then the next piece after that is really every company wants more sales.
And that’s the next big focus point of AI is how to help build
top of funnel, how to close more deals, how to close and faster.
So I think that the elephant in the room is that AI SDR.
And I’ve seen this done really poorly.
We talked a little bit about this.
So you and I both went to big football schools.
So I know you’ve got
a generic, like, silly references to cheers and rivalries, right?
Like, that’s that’s not what we’re going for in AI, in sales.
I think you’re absolutely correct.
So, how are you familiar with the the Gartner hype curve with, like,
the trough of disillusionment and things like that?
if you’re not familiar with the Gartner hype curve, with every technology,
there’s a lot of excitement and then it goes really high
and then it hits a plateau, and then it just crashes as people
just realize it’s not there.
And then it has maturity. Model on there.
I mean, and you’ll see that across all technologies.
And I think right now. AI is still that, hype curve.
And now we’re kind of hitting that trough of disillusionment, those silly messages
that you’re seeing from. AI SDRs on LinkedIn.
But there’s tremendous opportunities with AI,
and I’m sure you’re using ChatGPT or Copilot every day.
And you’re probably still amazed every day as to the the improvements
in the capabilities on it.
You know, as a, as a fun side joke,. I do some AI training.
Have you ever asked, ChatGPT
to, draw a glass of wine?
All the way full?. Have you ever tried that?
I have not.
So these are these are fun things.
Your audience can do that go to ChatGPT and ask you to draw a glass of wine
all the way full.
And a lot of times, it it can’t do that because it doesn’t.
It’s never seen a picture of a glass of wine all the way full.
It’s always seen it half full, because every piece of marketing
material out there on glasses of wine are always half full.
but it’s getting better and better and better.
It’s it’s, in fact, just the latest version
of chat to media that came out a week ago, kind of fix that problem.
So it’s it’s going to perfect that type of outreach.
But right now, the best place of using AI to help
build top of funnel, in my opinion, is finding new leads
and converting and and and starting the
and scoring them and then putting them into an engagement sequence.
So now you’ve probably used tools like, sixth sense or other, buyer intent data.
Right. Right.
if I recall those type of tools, they don’t tell you
who is looking who the individual is.
It’s just giving you indications of a company.
Might be a good sense, and I believe maybe.
Val, you can help me on this.
I think what they’re looking for is like Google searches or other messages
that they’re picking up on to detect that type of buyer intent signal.
Right.
That’s correct.
And then it kind of puts it in our hands to say, okay, who’s the most likely person
at this organization who might be that the source of that search
or that activity or that intent.
And then we’re holding the ball to see if we get that right.
Yeah, exactly.
Now with AI now, what you can do is, as an example, on LinkedIn,
maybe there’s an influencer on LinkedIn that’s in your space.
And how cool would it be to
have AI automatically look at every person that’s commenting on that influencer,
and then using AI to automatically score that person that commented or reacted
to the influencer to see if they fit your your ICP, and then to take action on it.
So I can be transformative and doing things that your human SDR
would be great at doing, but your human SDR
doesn’t have the time to go through every influencer on LinkedIn.
Look at read every single one of the posts, look at everyone
who’s reacting, and then put them into a flow.
And that’s a that is a great use case of AI as an SDR.
So I love that because so much of what I see right now
is just throwing AI over a data service, like zoom info,
and then pulling names and dropping them into a sequence.
So you’re saying, have AI do some real research for you, research
that a human might be limited in their ability to actually, administer.
Yep, yep. You’re obviously correct, and I don’t I don’t
propose getting rid
of SDRs or BDRs just yet.
I think that the time will come when it’s really perfected.
But AI is phenomenal at researching, right?
So, yeah.
Here’s another example.
One of my clients, are you familiar with the term recidivism?
It’s it’s trying to help people not go back to jail.
Absolutely.
So they, they provide grants,
free money to nonprofits that are involved in anti recidivism,
which is a great but a great program to be involved in.
You can go to a zoom info and you can search for nonprofits right.
You can search for foundations.
You can’t search for foundations or nonprofits that are focused on
anti recidivism.
So what you really need to do is you need to go to those platforms
as a, as a human SDR, download 10,000 foundations
and then have to manually go into each foundation’s website to read
what they actually do, because that’s what the traditional role of an SDR,
that’s a great use case of AI to automate going through that automatically.
And what’s great is that, these, these nonprofit, these nonprofits,
they don’t have the word anti recidivism.
Recidivism.
They’ll have things like, reentry programs.
Right.
Or other words that are that, you know, million different permutations of that.
But it’s understanding the context as to what that foundation does
and then alerting the SDR.
Okay, the. AI has identified your perfect fit.
So now you can go after and automate that.
Then then then the SDR can go after,
pick up the phone and call that that foundation.
What I hear you saying is that there’s some art in your prompt writing as well.
Right?
Because, as you mentioned, anti recidivism, it might not be the term,
but you might need to look at other terminology.
So really, there’s a skill here for SDRs or salespeople
to learn around writing prompts that are specific
and that actually achieve what you want them to achieve.
Yep, yep.
No, you’re you’re you’re you’re absolutely right.
And actually my my company, we actually provide a, more of an AI, SDR
service, because, SDR is and sales managers aren’t experts at prompt writing.
Right? So, what, what and and
so when
when you look at an AI, SDR,
I’m not a big fan of the concept of an AI,. SDR, SaaS platform
because I think those are basically zoom info searches
with some generic messaging, you know, look up the person on LinkedIn
and find out what school they went to
and then insert, you know, the typical variable,
you know, go Noles or go Gators.
And that’s where it’s not working.
But truly, foundational research
to identify the best ICP is a great, great first example.
So I guess, the crazy part is, Nick, that
if I was being outreach to by an AI SDR
and that I SDR was really good,. I might not know.
So, you know, it’s really
about having the AI, SDR,
so good
that you mistake it for a human. Yep.
Yeah.
And, I, I write proposals all day long.
Right?
I write proposals like I’m CRO.
I got my sales team writing proposals. We’re sending it to clients.
I am now detecting that a lot of my clients
are processing my proposal using ChatGPT.
Really?
So the questions I get back are ChatGPT
generated questions, and they’re fantastic questions, you know?
So guess what I do?. I take those questions.
And I used ChatGPT based upon my knowledge base of all my sample proposals
and responses, and it replies back with its answers.
Right.
So, a recent client, we did we were literally almost like
ChatGPT back and forth questions and answers.
So to get to your point, I think in a, in a, in a pretty quick period of time,
you’re going to have your AI
on like LinkedIn auto responding to you.
So you’re going to have AI SDRs talking to your AI,
and they’re just going to be ping ponging back and forth.
And it’s a scary proposition.
But I really think that’s where we’re going to be in a few years
where the, the, the outbound AI has to have
a very clean value proposition as to why they want to engage with you.
And your AI will then latch on to that value, do research on who’s
reaching out to you, triage if it’s a valuable company,
and then connect the dots and then set up the meeting.
Nice.
So the AI then could look at that, look at a lead, customize
a response, and potentially even try to set a call.
Yeah, absolutely. Wow. Yeah.
I mean, that would definitely bring efficiency to that process for sure.
Yeah. So are you.
This is a very technical term, but are you familiar with the term rest API?
Have you ever heard that term.
So the way applications so I know for example, you work with Insightly, right.
Insightly is a CRM system.
I bet zoom info probably has a button where you can export
contacts directly into Insightly as an example.
So the way it does that is through what’s called a Rest API.
It’s a way that computers can talk to other computer systems programmatically.
That’s been around for over 20 years.
There is a new protocol coming out that, about how an AI agent
can talk to another AI agent, which is really fascinating.
So basically two AI bots, one, that would be you.
Maybe you have an AI virtual assistant, and I have an AI virtual assistant,
and the two bots can can communicate back and forth in a certain way
to accelerate communications and transactions,
which will be really fascinating where we’re going
to have meetings booked on our calendars that we’ve had no manual input on.
So the, Insightly is,
coming to market quickly here with, an AI copilot
that, we’re super excited about and just excited to see get it in
the hands of our beta users to see exactly what they’re going to do with it.
It’s, it’s almost challenging for us at this point to, price
the offering and understand how the offering is going to be used.
And so our decision was we just got to get into the hands
of some people and see how they’re using it.
And then we have to learn from that, to know
how the best way to market and sell it really is.
Right.
And I bet you and so.. And Insightly copilot.
And I’ve worked with lots of other CRM systems.
They’re all coming out with their copilot.
AI platforms.
The future from there is really.
How does your copilot talk to the zoom info copilot?
Right.. And that’s where it gets really exciting.
So, like, even from insightly now, you could be calling your AI
copilot, could be calling out to another
AI copilot to maybe grab contacts and put them into insightly.
So the feature from there is incredible.
But right now I’m doing a lot of work.
The whole industry is doing a lot of work with using AI to help automate building
top of funnel.
So it’s automating,
finding contacts, triaging those contacts,
and then putting them into a CRM system like Insightly.
And then from there using a drip sequence like you’re familiar
with to automate the outreach to those contacts.
And then to your point is trying to make sure that messaging doesn’t
come across like an AI bot, because we’ve all been spammed to death on that.
I don’t know any marketing leader who wouldn’t be excited to see some help
come in to our outbound function in any way possible.
You know, so many organizations are so heavily reliant on inbound right now.
So what you’re describing really sounds to me like a way for our outbound
teams to have a lot more success with their cold outreach.
Yep. You’re absolutely correct.
And then also using other signals like,
you’ve now merged in with, with Unbounce, right?
And, Unbounce is all about going to landing pages, right?
And I assume Unbounce has some sort of like, web analytics
platform behind that and capturing that data.
So you have, forms where people are filling out the data.
Right.
And then you also have anonymous visitors that maybe you can de anonymize and
find out the actual name of the company that’s visiting your website.
What we’re
doing with AI right now, which is really incredible,
is there’s a couple of things when you’re filling out a form,
you want to take action on that form as fast as possible.
So what we’re doing with some clients is if a person is filling out a form,
how great would it be for. AI to immediately go out,
do a research on the person that filled out that form.
If they were asking for information,
tap into example proposals or marketing information or other literature
that can help provide evidence to the person filling out the form
that you can complete their, their request and then automate that request to them
to to turnaround that process as fast as possible.
So that’s where AI can be transformative.
Again, from a top of funnel perspective.
Absolutely. You know, we.
There’s some things I’ll never change, AI or not,
sometimes the first person to respond is the one that’s going to get that business.
So if we can leverage. AI to make our speed to response
not only faster, but, more,
enriched and, and, and powerful,
I really feel like that’s going to put us in an opportunity to win that business.
Yep, yep. You’re you’re spot on.
So one of one of my clients is an attorney.
So, like an accident attorney, and you seal them all in the billboards,
you see the phone numbers and things like that, right?
Well, when you call into those numbers, you’re
just getting a generic answering service.
They’re capturing some information.
They say, sure, we’ll call you back or whatever. Right.
I’m working with a client where the AI is picking up that call,
interfacing with the client.
But it’s a really smart AI.
It is way smarter than a paralegal.
So it provides confidence and evidence to the person
picking up the phone that that law firm can quickly,
support them or triage it to see if it’s a fit or not.
And if it’s a if it’s a strong fit, the AI will actually text message
an attorney immediately to say, hey, we got a we got a hot one on the line.
Well, you need it.
You need to call them right away.
And that’s a great example.
And that can be put on like an Unbounce landing
page as an example from an AI perspective.
But it’s all around the time to, you know, quickly turning around that lead.
Absolutely.
I feel like we could talk for hours, but, we do try to keep these episodes short.
So I’ll stop there.
If our audience wants to follow you or learn more about your organization.
And where can they find you?
Sure.
So my, my website is knowledge net dot AI.
You can go to that website and you can reach out to us via that,
or you can find me on LinkedIn.
So Nick Caruso at Knowledge Net Dot AI.
Am happy to, to continue the conversations with people from that perspective.
Great.. So much there to chew on. Thank you.
Thank you so much to all of you for joining us on Closing Time today.
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